European trade unions are concerned about the direction taken by the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union on the proposed directive on platform workers. They made this known in a letter sent to the Belgian minister responsible for the directive, Pierre-Yves Dermagne, on Friday 19 January.
In this letter, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) makes an “urgent call to reconsider the Presidency Proposal on the Directive on Improving Working Conditions in the platform economy”.
It says it is “extremely disappointed when the compromised text agreed in trialogue negotiations last December did not receive support among the Member States” (see EUROPE 13320/14), considering this to be “the best possible base to work on, to improve the conditions of platform workers in all sectors”.
The European trade unions fear that the text presented by the Presidency to the working group on 16 January, and which has received some support from Member States (see EUROPE 13330/25), “falls short of protecting workers, does not stop exploitative bogus-self-employment, and does not set a level playing field for companies in the platform economy”.
“Provisions allowing platforms not to match certain indicators because of collective bargaining are unacceptable because they pre-empt the possibility of activating the legal presumption” of salaried employment, writes the ETUC, referring to the new recital 31 of the legislative text in preparation, which is considered problematic.
“If you negotiate the tariffs, the sanctions, how supervision is done and if and how workers can subcontract, then you’re defining the subordination, and you cannot label it self-employment”, adds the confederation. It therefore opposes the provisions resulting from the amendments to Article 5, as well as the “weaker language on indicators, that big platform companies can easily circumvent, as it has been the case in Belgium so far”.
At the weekend, a large number of national trade unions wrote to their governments to persuade them not to support these new directions. Among them was the largest Dutch trade union, the FNV.
While the Netherlands rallied to the provisional agreement reached with Parliament at the end of December, the Dutch government can also live with this latest text, commented a source.
For the Dutch union, recital 31, also known as the ‘French derogation’ by its critics, is highly problematic, as is the new version of the criteria/indicators, which would even weaken the current protection of platform workers.
While the FNV welcomes certain advances in the text, such as transparency in algorithmic management, it will refuse to apply the principle of legal presumption of salaried status as set out in the latest compromise.
“The legal presumption of an employment relationship was supposed to strengthen the position of platform workers to be able to claim their rights. But the proposal which is now put forward in the Council is doing exactly the opposite”, Petra Bolster-Damen, International Secretary of the Dutch trade union, told EUROPE.
“The new indicators which are discussed by the Council [...] are tailor-made to continue their exploitative business models”, she added.
Most platform companies “exploit interchangeable labour, they don’t care who is working for them. The focus is wrong. Individual qualities of a platform worker are irrelevant if he or she has to compete against an app with an endless reservoir of others, just one click away for the customer”.
For the FNV, these indicators “are drafted in such a way that a platform worker doesn’t stand any real chance to activate a presumption” of salaried status, and this could be “dangerous because these indicators will wrongly become a benchmark on the European level”.
The Belgian Presidency was due to send the Member States a new compromise proposal at the time of going to press, with a view to requesting a new mandate from the Council on Wednesday 24 January at the meeting of the Member States’ ambassadors to the EU (Coreper).
To see the letter from the ETUC, go to https://aeur.eu/f/ahj (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)